on January 10, 2017
Since 1970, Northlands College has been providing post-secondary education options for people in Saskatchewan’s north. In the new millennium, the College continues to expand the range of career and education choices available to northern students, and SRNET is helping to provide the technological capacity to make it all possible.
President and CEO of Northlands College, Toby Greschner, has been working to improve the lives of people in the north for decades. He has also worked as a teacher in La Loche and with the provincial government as Assistant Deputy Minister in the Department of Northern Affairs. Greschner recognized the power that a tool like SRNET would bring, both in connecting the College’s far-flung locations — Northlands maintains university campuses in Air Ronge, La Ronge, Creighton, Ile-a-la-Crosse, and Buffalo Narrows—and in providing distance education course offerings from the University of Saskatchewan. Programs like the College’s new Mine School and a four-year Bachelor of Science in Nursing degree are made possible through the state-of-the-art network provided by SRNET.
One of the most important functions SRNET serves for Northlands is the ability to deliver video conferenced lectures from the U of S. Karla Hardcastle, the College’s Manager of University Programming, says “SRNET has provided us with very fast networking for video conference connections between students in the North and their professors in Saskatoon. We have reliable and high quality video and audio, which is essential for the delivery of our Nursing program.”
